Among Walter Ong's unfinished work is the book project titled Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization, which is related to a graduate seminar he taught at Saint Louis University in the 1987-88 and 1988-89 school years. A number of Ong's later publications are related to or derrive from this project, including "Text as Interpretation: Mark and After" (1986), "Orality-Literacy Studies and the Unity of the Human Race" (1987), "Before Textuality: Orality and Interpretation" (1989), "Technological Development and Writer-Subject-Reader Immediacies" (1990), "God's Known Universe and Christian Faith: Pastoral, Homiletic, and Devotional Reflections" (1991), "Hermeneutic Forever: Voice, Text, Digitization, and the 'I'" (1995), "Do We Live in a Post-Christian Age" (1996), "Information and/or Communication: Interactions" (1996), "Digitization Ancient and Modern: Beginnings of Writing and Today's Computers" (1998), "Ecology and Some of Its Future" (2002), and "Oralism to Online Thinking" (2003). Available here as .pdf files are select materials taken from the book project and the course files.
About Language as Hermeneutic
On February 26, 1990, Walter Ong wrote to Harvard University Press about his current book project Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization, which he planned to be about the size of Eric Havelock’s The Muse Learns to Write. In this letter [.pdf], he describes the book as such:
A capital point in the book is that each of the three major applications of technology to the originally oral verbal word has entailed some kind of binary digitization: (1) writing, through Socrates’s dialogue (oral people do not engage in Socrates’s binary yes-no dialogue); print, through Ramus’s dichotomization's; (3) electronics, through the computer. The computer has thus been in the making for over 2000 years, ever since technology impinged on the spoken word. The book’s conclusion is that it is no accident that our own era is both (1) the greatest age ever of digitization (taking things apart numerically) and (2) compensatingly, the greatest age ever of hermeneutics (relating everything back to everything else again—to the unbroken web of history). And hermeneutics dominates. Myth (which preceded logic by tens of thousand of years and which is holistic) still envelops logic. Logic cannot totally envelop myth—or, for that matter cannot envelop anything else totally.
Harvard UP was interested, but the project was never finished. A typed and signed cover letter [.pdf] kept with the typescript, dated September 28, 1994, indicates that Ong found the project “unsatisfactory.” The table of contents [.pdf] indicates there are 165 pages, and handwritten calculations on that page indicate the manuscript to 40,000 words, some 10,000 words less than Havelock’s A Muse Learns to Writes.
As written, Language as Hermeneutic has 15 chapters, including a prologue [.pdf] and epilogue, numbering 151 pages. A bibliography and other material bring the total typescript to165 pages. The chapters range from three to 28 pages in length.
Language as Hermeneutic Texts
Harvard UP Query Letter (.pdf, 61 kb)
Description: Two page annotated typescript. Ong's copy of the query letter he sent to Harvard UP regarding Language as Hermeneutic.
Typescript Cover Letter (.pdf, 10 kb)
Description: One page. Accompanying the unfinished manuscript is this cover letter in which Ong indicates that he believes Language as Hermeneutic to be "unsatisfactory."
Title Page and Table of Contents (.pdf, 16 kb)
Description: Two pages. The table of contents page includes Ong's handwritten calculations indicating the typescript to be 40,000 words.
Language as Hermeneutic Prologue (.pdf, 58 kb)
Description: Nine page annotated typescript. This is the prologue from the unfinished manuscript Language as Hermeneutic.
Language as Hermeneutics Subject Outline (.pdf, 44 kb)
Description: Two page annotated typescript. An outline, likely incomplete, listing 32 subjects to be covered in Language as Hermeneutic.
Language as Hermeneutic Course Documents
"Language as Hermeneutic Course Description" (.pdf, 12.2 kb)
Description: One page typescript. A description of the course Ong had planned to teach fall 1989, which was cancelled when Ong decided to retire from teaching. From the Language as Hermenetuic course files.
"Language as Hermeneutic Course Suggested Reading List" (.pdf, 16.9 kb)
Description: One page annotated typescript. The suggested reading list for the cancelled fall 1989 course. From the Language as Hermenetuic course files.
"Language as Hermeneutic Course Opening Remarks" (.pdf, 13.1 kb)
Description: One page annotated typescript. A description of the course Ong had planned to teach fall 1989, which was cancelled when Ong decided to retire from teaching. From the Language as Hermenetuic course files.
Language as Hermeneutic Course Notes
"Discourse and Silence" (.pdf, 21.8 kb)
Description: One page annotated typescript. Lecture notes from the Language as Hermeneutic course files.
"Holism in Our Approach to and/or Understanding of Language and Thought" (.pdf, 22.3 kb)
Description: One page annotated typescript. Lecture notes from the Language as Hermeneutic course files.
"Interpretation (Hermeneutic)" (.pdf, 90.1 kb)
Description: Three page annotated typescript. Lecture notes from the Language as Hermenetuic course files. A note cross-references "Words Are Ultimately Defined by the Nonverbal."
"Intertextuality as Retrieval of Orality" (.pdf, 20.4 kb)
Description: One page annotated typescript. Lecture notes from the Language as Hermenetuic course files.
"Literacy, Orality, Truth, and Method" (.pdf, 98.3 kb)
Description: Four page annotated typescript. Lecture notes from the Language as Hermeneutic course files.
"Technology of Writing and Its Sequels" (.pdf, 14.6 kb)
Description: One page annotated typescript. Lecture notes from the Language as Hermeneutic course files.
"Theorems on Language, Technology, and Community: The Embedding of Thought in the Material World" (.pdf, 22 kb)
Description: Two page typescript. Lecture notes from the Language as Hermenetuic course files.
"Words Are Ultimately Defined by the Nonverbal" (.pdf, 28.3 kb)
Description: One page typescript. Lecture notes from the Language as Hermenetuic class files.
"Writing and Reading Texts are Speech Events" (.pdf, 21.2 kb)
Description: Two page typescript. This short piece, dated Dec. 1990, appears to be the beginnings of an unfinished article related to Language as Hermeneutic.
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